This is the thing with a massive event like Echo Park Rising, there are more than 100 bands playing in the neighborhood at many different locations and you don’t know whom to begin with, so you end up with the already familiar and the obvious: Manhattan Murder Mystery was playing at the Echo in the middle of the afternoon, and this is where I started the festival. Anyway it was a good choice, because when you think about rising hell at any place, the disheveled band and its raucous sound are totally fitting.
I remember some people leaving some comments on this website not long ago, wondering why this band isn't more talked about, and I totally agree. Every Manhattan Murder Mystery show I have attended has been some epic episode of chaos, with poignant melodies buried in loudness. The songs are brutal and surge at you while grasping you by the guts, the music is loud and fuzzy, the lyrics shouted with rage and anguish, and soon everyone is intensely into it, rising arms and fists in the air while thinking about drinking himself into oblivion. It is always difficult to listen to the tragic-trailer-trash stories of the songs through this dense wall of loud music, but it doesn’t really matter as everyone seem to know them already,…
Actually it was not exactly the case for me this time, there were a lot of new songs that I had not heard before! They started with the rather mournful ‘Sancho’ off their latest release ‘Women House’, which had this line, heartbreaking to the core like any other line from any other MMM’s song, ‘Oh, you used to lie in bed with me/Now I don't lie in bed with anybody’, and they continued with new-to-me songs, like 'Bad Luck Blues’, ‘Bathroom song’? But I am not entirely sure as I couldn’t read the writing on the setlist very well.
Matthew Teardrop was wearing his habitual backpack-hoodie-bandana uniform, but there was another guitarist playing with the usual trio and he was adding to the songs layers I hadn’t paid attention to before. At four, they built an amazing blustering sound, with long instrumental moments turning into a violent punk-psychedelia, alternating with spitting-out lyrics and fast military-style drumming – Teardrop used to wear a military helmet, so it is not surprising. At one point, Teardrop was so happy that he threw his bandana to the crowd, a totally curious move for a guy who writes Bukowski-style lyrics, but it may have been more an accident than him suddenly turning into Elvis Presley.
As he had done it so many times before, Teardrop jumped in the crowd at the end of the last song ‘Parking Lot’, finishing it in the middle of people, away from the spotlight of the stage. But it is exactly where his visceral music belongs, all the raw emotions have to be fired in the dark in a cathartic ending.
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